tai chi.

Tuesday and Thursday mornings some of us get up at the crack of dawn (6:30) and walk down to the school’s track and field for our Tai Chi class. One of the directors of the school is a women and she teaches it. It is definitely been a highlight of my experience so far. It is nice to have something to learn and look forward to other than doing lesson plans and teaching. The director is really good at it, and it is surprisingly really hard. Have you ever seen old Chinese people doing slow hand and leg movements in a park? That’s Tai Chi. But it is way more than just hand and leg movements. There are 24 steps to a song and we only learned three of them today in our 40 min class. It was so fun to learn some different choreography and have to memorize it and perform it without the teacher leading. I felt so accomplished afterwards! I cannot wait for the next class.

Sorry I have been kind of MIA lately…we’ve been busy little Chinese dragons.

I went to Beijing two weekends ago with some of the girls and it was unreal. Love Beijing. Love the Great Wall. Love the Silk Market. Love the Jade Youth Hostel. It was all so amazing. Beijing is a gorgeous big city. It kind of reminds me of NYC but Chinese…haha. It was so nice to see other Americans and Europeans walking around. I swear we are the ONLY white people in all of Weihai. We stayed at this awesome hostel with great rooms and bathrooms with real toilets and hot water showers. The front desk people spoke English and were so helpful! They gave us these cards with Chinese characters on them of places to show our taxi drivers to take us. We decided to go to the Silk Market our first day.

What do I say about the Silk Market? Probably one of my more favorite places in the world. Six story mall, filled with booths and booths of any low price designer thing you could ever want. And all of it is REAL! They even have disclaimer signs all around that can prove that their merchandise is real. This is my shopping heaven. I won’t name all of the stuff I bought…haha…and I won’t name all of the stuff I am going to buy when we go back in November and December. Ok, I will name a few. Seven jeans, Burberry perfume, Ray Ban’s, UGGs, Coach shoes, D+C purses, jade jewelry, pearl necklaces, pea coats, TV show DVD’s, and moooooore!! I could go on for days. They have everthing. Did I mention everything is DIRT CHEAP? Seriously though, they expect you to barter. These people are professionals at their job and they will jack up the price just because you are a stupid American. We showed them. For example- my Burberry The Beat perfume (real), would probably cost about $80 in the US. The lady wanted to sell it to me for 250 yuan ($35). That is a good price already right? No. Everyone tells you to barter half of the price they give you and go up from there. After a few hours of shopping, we learned we could go a lot less than half. I told her I wanted the perfume for 30 yuan ($4). She looked at me like I was crazy and said, “No no lady, you crazy”. I said, “Fine, I will just go somewhere else…” The minute I started to walk away she yelled, “Ok! Ok! 30! Just for you, good price just for you”. I walked away with a huge smile on my face.

The Great Wall was the most amazing hike I have ever done by far. We went with a tour group and drove three hours away from Beijing to get to a less touristy place on the Wall. Our hike was seven miles and it took us four hours. Talk about the stair master of masters. I have never walked up and down so many stairs in my life. Our legs were shaking by the end but it was so worth it. The views were unbelievable and we got some great pictures. There is so much history to the Wall and I loved reading all of the informational signs on the way. At the end of our hike you had the choice to pay about 6 dollars to zip-line off the Wall. How many people can say they zip-lined off of THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA? Me.

My life is amazing. Everyday we just look at each other and go, “How did we get here? How did our lives get to China?” It’s crazy and insane but I love every minute.